Optical Rebrightening of Extragalactic Transients from the Zwicky Transient Facility

Abstract

Ongoing large-scale optical time-domain surveys, such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), are producing alerts at unprecedented rates. Analysis of transient sources has so far followed two distinct paths: archival analysis of data on transient sources at a time when they are no longer observable and real-time analysis at the time when the sources are first detected. The latter is the realm of alert brokers such as the Arizona-NOIRLab Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES). In this paper, we synthesize the two analysis paths and present a first systematic study of archival alert-broker data, focusing on extragalactic transients with multipeaked light curves identified in the ANTARES archive of ZTF alerts. Our analysis yields a sample of 37 such sources, including core-collapse supernovae (with two analogs of iPTF14hls), thermonuclear supernovae interacting with their surrounding circumstellar medium, tidal disruption events, luminous blue variables, and as yet unclassified objects. A large fraction of the identified sources is currently active, warranting allocation of follow-up resources in the immediate future to further constrain their nature and the physical processes at work.

Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters

References in corpus (10)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: System Overview, Performance, and First Results
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: Data Processing, Products, and Archive
• The Second-Generation Guide Star Catalog: Description and Properties
• The Catalina Surveys Periodic Variable Star Catalog
• A Sample of Type II-L Supernovae
• Energetic eruptions leading to a peculiar hydrogen-rich explosion of a massive star
• Nebular spectroscopy: A guide on H II regions and planetary nebulae
• A new class of flares from accreting supermassive black holes
• The ANTARES Astronomical Time-Domain Event Broker

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Seven years of coordinated Chandra-NuSTAR observations of SN2014C unfold the extreme mass-loss history of its stellar progenitor
• SDSS1335+0728: The awakening of a $\sim 10^6{M}_{\odot }$ black hole
• Panchromatic evolution of three luminous red novae: Forbidden hugs in pandemic times -- IV
• A thermonuclear supernova interacting with hydrogen- and helium-deficient circumstellar material. SN 2020aeuh as a SN Ia-CSM-C/O?
• ZTF-observed late-time signals of pre-ZTF transients
• The story of SN 2021aatd -- a peculiar 1987A-like supernova with an early-phase luminosity excess
• Modeling the circumstellar interaction around SN 2004gq
• Can circumstellar interaction explain the strange light curve features of Type Ib/c supernovae?
• The Delay Time Distribution of Tidal Disruption Events